Is Barack Obama Really a Realist?

At the risk of turning this site into an online seminar on international relations, I feel obliged to respond to comments made by my colleagues Daniel Larison and Noah Millman in response to my earlier post about Obama and foreign-policy realism GOP-style.

I think that this discussion is important because Republican leaders and conservative/ libertarian thinkers need to bid farewell to the neoconservative agenda and to embrace a new foreign-policy doctrine. That process should evolve out of the re-examination of U.S. global interests and result in the readjustment of American policies to the changing geo-political and geo-economic realities. But this debate hasn’t been taking place among Republicans and conservatives who seem to be ceding the control over it to President Obama, with Republican Chuck Hagel being now part of his national-security team.

I do agree with Noah that realism is an international-relations theory and that it is difficult to identify “realists” or their old intellectual rivals, the “idealists,” in the real world of foreign policy. But in the narratives we draw up about the debates over social and economic policies, “conservatives” and “liberals” play the leading role—even though, like “realists” and “idealists,” they are nothing more than “ideal types” to use Max Weber’s terminology, a construct that helps us make sense of the messy social and political reality around us by stressing the common characteristics of a certain phenomenon or school of thought.

So, for example, we all recognize and accept that there are conservatives who are “pro-choice” (in itself an ideal type) and who support gay marriage and some liberals who are “pro-life” and are opposed to the decriminalization of the use of marijuana. But we use the term “liberal” or “conservative” to describe the political views of someone, instead of detailing all his or her positions on political issue, even when some of his or her views are exceptions to the type.

Similarly, consider, for example, Democrat Zbigniew Brzezinski, who together with Republican Brent Scrowcroft is considered now by the Washington establishment as the elder statesman of American realism. Zbigniew is strongly committed to the main tenets of Realpolitik and argues that America’s. strategic interests, and not its devotion to lofty ideals like human rights. should determine U.S. foreign policy, especially when it comes to the use of military power, which explains why he supports expanding U.S. ties with China.

But then whenever the issue of American policy towards Russia comes up, “Zbig” is transformed into a flaming idealist, charging the Russians with the violation of human rights and repression of ethnic minorities, and urges Washington to punish Moscow. Why the difference between the attitude towards China and to Russia? Well, I invite you to lunch at your favorite Polish restaurant if you know the answer.

In short, one man’s realist can be another man’s idealist under certain conditions. But Brzezinski still remains a realist in my book, one who believes in the main principle of the American tradition of realism, as defined by the political thinker Walter Lippmann, that foreign policy “has been formed only when commitments and power have been brought into balance” and the nation “must maintain its objectives and its power in equilibrium, its purposes within its means and its means equal to its purposes.”

But I certainly agree with Noah and Daniel that it would be difficult to pigeonhole the U.S. presidents since 1945 as exclusively realists or idealists, since they have all pursued policies that exhibited elements of both these schools of thought.

One should recall that the first and second president Bush alike used realist and idealist rationales to justify their interventions in Iraq. The realist Bush the Elder, like a good old fashioned Wilsonian, compared Saddam to Hitler and argued that the occupation of Kuwait violated international law and that Iraq was committing atrocities in Kuwait. The neoconservative Bush the Younger sounded the Realpolitik man of action when he alleged that Iraq had acquired weapons of mass destruction and that it posed a direct threat to the interests of the U.S. and its allies.

Yet as someone who has written quite forcefully against the Obama administration’s decision intervene indirectly in the civil war in Libya—who argued that it was Europe’s affair and that Washington shouldn’t follow France’s lead there—and who was also opposed to the Clinton administration’s direct intervention in the civil war in Yugoslavia, I don’t buy the Larison Axiom that these are the two case-studies that allow us to decide who is a real realist and who is not.

In both cases, it was possible to support U.S. military intervention based on consideration of American national interests. For example, read a golden oldie, The Third American Empire from 1996 in which self-proclaimed realists Jacob Heilbrunn and Michael Lind explained why the deployment of American troops into the former Yugoslavia should be seen as part of the protection of U.S. geostrategic interests. From my realist perspective, they were wrong. But their credentials as realists remained intact. And while it’s true that the first Bush resisted the pressure to intervene in Yugoslavia, I am not sure that he wouldn’t have done the same as Clinton did if elected to a second term.

In any case, since Daniel mentioned U.S. interests, French intervention, and Dwight Eisenhower in the same sentence, let me remind him that as Fredrik Logevall details in Embers of War, Eisenhower supported French efforts to secure its colonial possessions in Southeast Asia during the 1950s through massive military and diplomatic assistance and decided to replace it as the hegemon in South Vietnam after the French were kicked out (with Republican Nixon extending the war there until the bitter end) making Obama’s intervention in Libya look like a French aperitif. And I’m not even mentioning Republican presidents (including Eisenhower) practicing regime change in Iran (in coordination with the Brits), Guatemala, Lebanon, Cambodia, Laos, Chile, Panama, and Congo, among other places.

Again, based on my reading of President Obama’s foreign policy, including his resistance to get drawn into intervention in Syria and into war with Iran, his muddling through or empiricist approach toward the so-called Arab Spring, his ending the war in Iraq and accelerating the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the emphasis on the U.S. relationship with other great powers and on the need to protect U.S. interests as opposed to the global promotion of democracy, I would argue that when its comes to foreign policy and national security, President Obama can be compared favorably with Republican President George H. W. Bush. And in contrast to the current Republican foreign policy agenda—with its emphasis of invading countries and doing regime change here, there, and everywhere—President Obama is at least trying to bring U.S. global commitments and power into some balance.

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5 Responses to Is Barack Obama Really a Realist?

One keeps hearing about strengthening relations with other powers (and how Hillary improved relations). Lets first look at Russia, following even the news casually, will tell you that relations between Russia and USA are getting worse not better. China, America has decided to encircle China with the “pivot”, despite Bush being a reckless interventionist, I did not see him treating China with such hostility. India, I stand to be corrected, but the relationship has not changed significantly with the change of US regimes. Iran and the middle east in general, despite the much vaunted Arab spring, foreign relations are still bad, if not worse.

I see is France loving America again, whether they are a “great power” is debatable, but most would agree that having bad relations with France is hardly a threat to world peace, and cannot be considered as a diplomatic triumph.

A.) Lots of the “problem” is the silly, time-wasting attempt to pin one or the other labels on individuals. As Hadar writes, sometimes one leader or commentator acts or analyzes one way, and sometimes the same leader or commentator acts or analyzes another.

Stick to using the labels to describe specific *policies* directed at specific problems and you’ll restore at least some semblance of substance to the terms.

B.) What’s needed beyond that is some definition of the dividing line between realism and idealism since the problem, almost invariably, is that most people pushing idealist policies claim the realist mantle instead by saying that their prescription(s) do serve the interests of their country.

E.g., the idea that the U.S. invading, occupying and “building up” all of Africa is really a matter of realism because spreading liberal democracy generally is only likely to help the U.S. in the long run.

What’s needed is some sort of equation asking whether a certain prescription serves to secure a country’s interest in a reasonably direct fashion in a reasonably near-term period of time. If so, that seems realist enough.

All that’s further needed, it seems to me, is for realists to recognize that there is still a place for idealist policies, such as encouraging human rights generally or etc. However, their very indirect, long-term nature is also an argument to use extreme modesty in furthering such policies, and above all to make sure they don’t conflict with our more direct and immediate interests.

Of course no equation differentiating “realism” from “idealism” is going to be perfect, but the foregoing I think might substantially help.

But then whenever the issue of American policy towards Russia comes up, “Zbig” is transformed into a flaming idealist, charging the Russians with the violation of human rights and repression of ethnic minorities, and urges Washington to punish Moscow. Why the difference between the attitude towards China and to Russia? Well, I invite you to lunch at your favorite Polish restaurant if you know the answer.

Good point. In Russia Zbig is perceived one-dimensionally, and not without justification, as a flaming russophobe. The issue, however, is much larger than just Zbig’s indigestion when it comes to everything Russian, the issue is in using the vehicle of US foreign policy for settling of own personal scores and grudges, whatever they may be, and for channeling own personal passions disregarding the real interest of a country. So, the term “idealist” in case of Zbig does not exactly cut it. Russia and Poland, certainly, have very many mutual grudges, which go back several centuries (those who visited the Red Square may understand it) and not always Russia was a good neighbor for Poles, to say the least, and was at fault, but the question here is this–whose interests, realistically, Zbig represents when it comes to Russia? My guess would be–certainly not of US. All this with understanding that Russia is very many things and many of them, speaking in plain language, are not good, including some points which Zbig justifiably makes. But even those, seemingly, redeeming observations do not cut it when one looks at the totality of Zbig’s “activity” in relation to Russia be it the origin of Afghanistan quagmire or Zbig’s dealings with Chechen “freedom fighters”–hardly a “realist” record, rather the manifestation of single-mindedness when it comes down to inflicting pain on Russians by any means.